I’m back from a few days in Berlin with J & J. Much walking, beer drinking, riding on trains, marveling at the clean and safe streets, etc. I will post a few pictures soon.

Recently read Atonement. The first 80 pages crawl by but once you hit the end of the first section it’s incredibly gripping. It’s amazing how he can throw clever post-modern tricks into a mainstream page-turner.

I’m currently reading Valerie Martin’s Property. She’s a fantastic writer and person so I can’t recommend it enough.

Soon, I’ll be loading up on Russian lit in preparation for my trip to St. Petersburg in June.

We saw Phone Booth and the premise amazes and vexes me: a creep decides to punish a man for lying by shooting at him. What’s amazing to me is that the lying stems from his career in public relations. Couldn’t they have found a lying oil executive, or politician or mob hit man or crooked stock broker or thief? Are we really that bad?